


Fellow Feeling

by Acai



Series: Iwaoi Soulmate AU [2]
Category: haikyuu
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, College AU, First Meetings, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Soulmate AU, Youtuber AU, asadaisuga is implied, coffee shop AU, idk its every au ever, iwaizumi's a med student with good arms, iwaizumi's not, matsuhana is implied, oikawa's a youtuber, oikawa's clueless, suga is a dear, time-skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 12:29:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7934629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oikawa swears Sugawara is a bad influence, and his proof comes in the fact that it’s two am and he’s back at the coffee shop. </p><p>((Part two of three of the Iwaoi soulmate AU. Oikawa's clueless, Iwaizumi's got nice arms, and they meet officially at a coffee shop.))</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fellow Feeling

**Author's Note:**

> Read part one first if you haven't read that yet, it'll make more sense. This is a little messily written because I kept getting distracted on Facebook like the white mom I am, but you get the point. There will be a final addition to this and it’ll be long, so stay tuned!  
> ((Note: My username did just change from @H0mestuck to @Acai. If this causes lots of trouble, I have the username saved and can easily switch back. Feel free to message me on Tumblr @Aobajosighs.))

**A sequel to _Cigarette Kisses_** **told from Oikawa’s point of view**

**-suggested by Quill_Jottings on Archiveofourown**

**Feel free to send prompts to Aobajosighs on Tumblr.**

            When Oikawa’s five years old he almost has to repeat kindergarten. His teachers all say that his social skills aren’t developed enough because he ignores all the other kids and his mother argues that he’s just quiet. He manages to go on to first grade, but his mother signs him up for ‘social skills classes’. The woman who tries to teach him social cues also attempts to convince his mother that activities will make him more social, more well-rounded and more academic. His mother must think this sounds reasonable, because she signs him up for so many activities that by the time he’s seven he’s almost never home. He goes to piano lessons and volleyball and clubs with other children who were forced there by their own mothers. His father leaves and his mother pretends like they move because she thinks Oikawa will be more social somewhere else, but he thinks it’s because the house makes her sad to look at.

They move into a new house that doesn’t make her sad. It’s blue on the outside and blue on the inside, but it’s empty and bare and smells like paint. He goes to piano classes and volleyball and clubs and when he get home it smells like the vanilla candles that his mother stuck all over to chase away the scent of paint. His mother tells him that a nice boy his age lives across the street, but she never lets him stay home long enough to be there when he comes over with brownies or cookies.

She thinks he’s probably made plenty of friends, but Oikawa’s fairly sure he doesn’t _want_ to be friends with those kids. They throw fits over everything and they’re nasty to the people they don’t like. They all have names, but names are for the special people in your life. None of those people were particularly special to Oikawa, and he disregarded their names before he’d ever even learned them in the first place.

On the first day of school the teacher makes them all introduce themselves. They all stand up and say something about themselves, and Oikawa tosses aside the names and watches their faces instead of listening to the words. They talk about sports and summer trips, but Oikawa watches to see how they smile in the fakest way, pretending to laugh but slanting their eyebrows and pulling their cheeks tightly, chuckling sharply and looking away quickly afterwards.

They’re all fake, and Oikawa can tell they’re going to be just as mean as the kids from his summer clubs.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Adults liked to say that eleven was too young to date, but girls in his class seemed to think otherwise. They waited until class ended before they stalked him down the halls and pounced, asking with lips jutting out in fake pouts and chests stuck out like he’d really care for that. He’d say yes because they’d cry and gossip when he said no, but he always found a way to break it off gently. People talked to him like they cared what he had to say, and Oikawa answered like he knew their names and faces.

Everybody lied about everything, and Oikawa couldn’t bring himself to pretend in the same way. He pulled tight smiles and his eyebrows didn’t raise when he was pretending to be happy, so he faked it like the rest of them, but they seemed to do it naturally and without giving it a second thought. Oikawa seemed to never think about anything else.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He plays volleyball because you don’t need to talk when you play a sport, and it was the only sport that he’d really liked when he’d been younger. So he plays volleyball and talks to two of the boys on the volleyball team. They’re soulmates, always standing side-by-side and always touching shoulders when they stood, but they weren’t catty or fake. They were blunt and concise and smirked when their teammates started drama, and Oikawa decided that their names were worth remembering.

They’re always online, saying things that Oikawa doesn’t get and then laughing like they told an award winning joke. Oikawa gets a Tumblr and decides the jokes aren’t any funnier when you understand what they mean.

But he remains on the internet anyway, if only because it’s better than talking to the people in the real world. 

They talk to him like they care and he mumbles replies and stares at his hands in hopes that they’d _get the hint_ and _go away._ He’s pretty sure that someday somebody will realize he’s a complete asshole to everyone, but that day hasn’t come yet and they all seem weirdly infatuated with the way he looks. As if they know him because of his face, as if they know a thing about him.

They don’t.

His mother continues putting vanilla candles in the house long after the paint smell goes away, saying it smells like home that way. She switches it up, once, before changing it right back to vanilla a couple weeks later. Hanamaki and Matsukawa tease him because the smell lingers on him, but he teases them right back because they show up to practice with messy, tousled hair and everybody knows why they’re late.

He skipped the classes that he knew would make him talk to people and he kissed girls who never cared about anything more than the face they saw in the mirror, but he never learned their names and always let them down easy because he wasn’t fake enough to not care when he saw them cry.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He kisses a girl when he graduates, and the smell of smoke sticks to her close and tangles with the taste of her mouth. She’s dangerous looking and nameless, eyes darkened with makeup that’s smudged from the heat rubbing at tired eyes.

She whispers pretty things to him about a pretty face but slithers off into the crowd to go kiss more guys anyway. Her mouth already tastes like a watered down mix of smoke and boys, but he likes the drama, he likes the getting hurt. She disappears in the mass of people and Oikawa doesn’t fix his messy hair when he sits down for the ceremony.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Nobody can make you go out to clubs and make friends when you’re an adult and you’re moved out, but Oikawa stays home for the summer anyway. He’ll go to college in the fall, but he’ll wait a little longer before he leaves.

In the meantime he follows a hobby he’s picked up over the past year since he was tempted onto the internet by Hanamaki’s dumb meme jokes. He talks to a camera when he’s home alone, talking about dumb things and making videos about things that make people laugh. He’s not sure why he does it, but he thinks it’s because everybody is a bit more honest on the internet. People speak their minds and they’re who they really are, and that’s who he wants to meet in this world.

The numbers of subscribers inch higher and higher until it seems like people care what he has to say about things, and he’s not really sure why. He makes more videos anyway, doing livestreams when he doesn’t have any good ideas for what he should make a video about.

People ask all the time about his soulmate, but Oikawa doesn’t know anything that they don’t except that he’s called _Hajime_.

He really doesn’t want to meet his soulmate because of his awkward videos, but he has a feeling that’s probably going to be what happens.

Oikawa’s honest online, but not completely honest. He talks and laughs and lets people know what he thinks, but the jokes are forced and the smiles are, more often than not, fake. It’s how the world functions, it’s how things are supposed to be.

He makes a mock makeup tutorial because he wants an excuse to play with makeup. The pretty things that belong to girls are too tempting to resist, so he jokes with his subscribers as an excuse to wing his eyeliner and contour his cheeks. He’ll probably make up an excuse to wear a skirt next time.

Oikawa attends conventions and goes to university in the fall, rooming with a boy named Sugawara. His roommate makes appearances in the background of his videos, chiding him for not doing the dishes and correcting him when his facts are wrong. Sugawara has two soulmates, both boys who he went to high school with in his same year, and they come over for dinner sometimes. Those are the only times that they use their table, and Oikawa opts out and eats in his room. Sugawara always tries to tell him to get out more, and Oikawa always tells him that he sounds like his mom.

He goes to classes in the daytime and works on YouTube videos at the nighttime, but everything feels like its drifting and everything feels too fake to care about. He feels like gravity is too heavy and he doesn’t want to be weighted down to the Earth anymore, but there’s no way to turn the gravity off and he’s just stuck. He’s heavy and stuck and he can jump as much as he’d like but it’ll never be high enough.

Sugawara usually kicks Oikawa out when he has his soulmates over, mostly because Oikawa likes to lie on the ground and everybody trips over him while he randomly tries to make them believe that aliens are real, and this makes the whole process of making dinner a little hard. He doesn’t know the names of the soulmates, but they’re both nice people. He watches them interact, soft kisses and gentle touches and pretty words that they really mean. He watches them as they watch each other with the same gentle fondness in their eyes. Some part of him feels a little bit sad, knowing that he doesn’t have that.

Koushi doesn’t kick him out when he walks into the room and Oikawa’s already in a wad of blankets on the ground. It’s not a strange occurrence, but normally he isn’t blatantly sad about things that he can’t express. Sugawara doesn’t say anything except that his soulmates will be there in ten minutes, and Oikawa expects him to prompt Oikawa to go get coffee or something, but instead he just goes back to the kitchen. A cup of tea is left on his bedside table and Oikawa hears the door open soon after Suga leaves again. Oikawa stays in his room and they stay in the kitchen, voices soft and giggles prominent. Oikawa’s glad that they’ve all got each other, glad they’re all so kind and glad they get along so well.

People seem to filter in an out without ever lingering long enough to mean a thing to anyone. Everyone comes and goes but nobody stays and nobody has a name.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sugawara goes back to kicking him out the next time that he has people over.

He says he’s having a group of people from high school over, and he says _ever so politely_ that wouldn’t Oikawa like to try that new coffee shop down the street?

Oikawa would not like to try that new coffee shop down the street, but Sugawara’s one of the few tolerable people on this Earth and Oikawa gets off his lazy ass and goes along with pretending that _yeah, that coffee shop looked really interesting, Kou-chan!_

((The coffee shop did not look really interesting.))

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa swears Sugawara is a bad influence, and his proof comes in the fact that it’s two am and he’s back at the coffee shop. It’s empty except for a barista who looks like he’s still mourning MCR’s breakup and a boy staring blankly at an equally blank document on his laptop. There’s a cooling cup of coffee next to him and Oikawa’s fairly sure they went to school together.

He dismisses the thought, ordering something seasonally flavored and warm. It occurs to him that they _did_ go to school together. They were in the same class every other year or so and he was one of the only kids that Oikawa could tolerate. He wasn’t friendly, but he wasn’t fake either. He never talked to many people, honestly, though he was always pretty kind to Oikawa. They’d gotten along, but Oikawa had never decided to remember his name.

He approaches him before he can even figure out why, holding his hand out.

“We went to school together, right?” The other boy looked at him for a second before shaking Oikawa’s hand. Neither of them let go, and their hands stayed awkwardly touching in between them. Oikawa was pretty sure his name started with _Iwa._

“Yeah,” Iwa-chan glanced down at their hands briefly before his eyes settled on Oikawa’s face. “We did.”

Oikawa nods as if this is a very good thing. “Oikawa Tooru,” he says, as if he’s just saying this to be polite because they’re _still_ awkwardly holding hands over the coffee table. In reality he just hopes the other boy will introduce himself back.

“Iwaizumi Hajime,” he says, and Oikawa’s first thought is _Iwa_ _was right._ His second thought is a little more jarring, and his hand slips from their hand-holding session. _Hajime._

It’s familiar, it’s familiar, it’s familiar—it’s the name on the inside of his wrist.

“Hajime,” he says once, turning furiously red when he realizes that he’s definitely just called a stranger by his given name. “Sorry! Ah, I just—you know what, forget that happened, maybe. It’s just a familiar name.”

A ghost of a smile twitches on Iwaizumi’s lips, and Oikawa internally curses his brain for remembering the boy as _Iwa-chan._ Iwaizumi closes his laptop, seeming to have admitted defeat on whatever he was writing. “It’s fine,” he says. “Your name’s familiar, too. Do you want to, uh, sit down?”

It’s awkward, Oikawa can tell. They’re both awkward and Oikawa’s trying to stop calling him Iwa-chan in his head, but it’s funny now and he can tell he’s not going to be able to stop. They’re both awkward and neither of them knows what they’re doing, but Oikawa nods once and pulls out the chair opposite of Iwaizumi.

Oikawa has a sneaking, sneaking suspicion. He’s fairly _certain_ he knows what’s going on here. In movies this is the moment when people pull up their sleeves and present their arms to see if they’re soulmates, but Oikawa just blows the steam off his coffee and leans back in his chair.

“What are you writing?” It’s an awkward attempt at conversation, but it’ll have to do.

“Nothing, currently,” Iwaizumi says, throwing his laptop a dirty glare. “Isn’t two in the morning supposed to be a really good time for inspiration? It’s supposed to be an essay, though.”

Oikawa thinks back to the title of the document—the only thing written—and grins when he says, “a medical student! That’s a hard major.”

“Yeah, well,” Iwaizumi shrugs. “I like that kind of stuff. What’s your major, then?”

“English literature. It’s no medical major, but it is pretty fun to study.”

“You weren’t this chatty in school,” Iwaizumi comments dryly, setting his cup back down onto the table.

Oikawa hums, realizing that Iwaizumi remembers him, but he doesn’t recall much about Iwaizumi. Oikawa’s nagging suspicion lingers, but he’s not sure about how to approach the question. “No,” he agrees. “But I had a feeling.”

A smile really does twitch onto Iwaizumi’s lips this time, even if it’s just faintly. “A feeling.”

Oikawa squints at him, pouting slightly. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You’re just trying to make it awkward now!”

He does recall Iwaizumi Hajime never being much of one to talk to people, but he was always kind during group projects and partner work.

Iwaizumi hums in agreement, seeming not fully committed to the whole conversation. He turns his arm over, anyway, and there it is in pretty, looping letters. _Tooru._

Oikawa thinks of the _Hajime_ that loops in the same font on his own wrist. Iwaizumi already seems to know, even if he seems not fully committed and bored. Something in his eyes says that Oikawa doesn’t really need to overturn his own wrist to verify that this is it.

Oikawa’s eyes shift to meet Iwaizumi’s and he flushes when they do meet, the awkwardness of the situation coming back suddenly. He doesn’t know what to say, so he takes another drink of coffee and glances down at the table. He looks back up and Iwaizumi’s eyes have strayed to the barista, who’s still glaring vehemently at everything while he cleans counters.

He scrambles to pull out his phone. “Um—if you want to text me sometime to see each other again, uh,” he pauses, not sure what he’s trying to say. Iwaizumi seems to get it anyway.

(Oikawa’s head is still referring to him as Iwa-chan, and Oikawa’s fairly sure that he needs to put a stop to that before he accidently refers to him _as_ Iwa-chan.)

Iwaizumi puts his number into Oikawa’s phone and Oikawa sends him a fast text so that he’ll have Oikawa’s number. It’s past three, and it’ll be almost four AM by the time they get home. They both know that, standing up regretfully. Iwaizumi’s watching him with a look that Oikawa can’t understand even after years of social cue lessons.

They don’t say anything for a second until Iwaizumi slides his laptop into his bag and slings it over his shoulder.

“I can text you soon, if you want,” Oikawa says, hoping he doesn’t sound too forward. “Maybe we can, uh, meet up here again?”

“Yeah,” Iwaizumi agrees, looking awfully good in what he’s wearing. “Let’s do that.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa closes the door a little too loudly when he gets back home. He puts the coffee on his counter, taking a deep breath in before collapsing onto the couch.

 A door opens from down the hall and a disgruntled Sugawa appears in his vision.

“Why are you awake?”

“He’s _hot_ ,” Oikawa says in place of a reply,

“Who?” Suga sounds just as confused as he looks, tired and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Did you just get home?”

“He’s a _medical student.”_ Oikawa sat up, feeling the caffeine weaving its way through his system. “Oh my god, we went to the same high school and I never even noticed him.”

“Are you okay?”

Oikawa groaned loudly in answer, looking at Sugawara helplessly. It seems to click in Suga’s mind what Oikawa’s talking about, because he says, “you…met your soulmate at three in the morning? Where did you even _go?_ ”

“You told me to go to the coffee shop more often! There’s coffee left if you want it. He’s _hot,_ Kou-chan, I’m _screwed._ ”

Sugawara seems to consider the caffeine for a second before he downs it, sitting down on the couch next to Oikawa. “I wouldn’t say screwed, maybe just permanently wrecked by his nice thighs,” he supplied helpfully, eyes looking lost in thought after the word ‘thighs’.

“No, it was the _arms._ Fucking _bara arms._ ”

“I like the eyes, personally.”

“The _eyes,_ ” Oikawa groans, unsure of how he managed to miss a guy like that for years.

Sugawara yawns widely, assuring Oikawa once more that he was absolutely screwed because of those bara arms.

It occurs to Oikawa that the whole night felt real and grounding, and he didn’t feel suffocated with gravity for one moment, at the very least. He’s fairly sure that he’ll text Iwaizumi by midday tomorrow, because hasn’t be waited long enough by now?

Until then, Suga looks half asleep and Oikawa’s got a half-finished essay that’s due tomorrow, so he clambers off the couch and tries to shove any thoughts of bara arms and warm brown eyes out of his head.

Sugawara still looks focused on the thought of thighs, so Oikawa prods his shoulder and puts the rest of the coffee in the fridge.

Yeah, he’ll text Iwaizumi tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> Part three will have several chapters, so it'll take a little longer. Follow me on Tumblr at Aobajosighs to stay updated on this fic and all of the others, and feel free to send me prompts. Tell me what you thought in the comments below, and thank you for reading UvU


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